Annnnd another one

Myra King, whose son, Raymond Anthony Frost, was convicted of her murder in 1998. Myra has been missing from California since 1993. No picture, alas.

Murders without bodies

I was working on adding additional (gruesome) details to one of my murder-without-a-body cases on Charley and found this from the Chicago Tribune. It talks about several MWAB cases from Illinois, including Michael Howarth, convicted of murdering his four-year-old neighbor Angelica Mena, and Garry Huff, convicted of murdering his wife Cheryl Huff. I don’t think either of these bodies were ever found. First time I’ve ever heard of either of those cases, and I find photos of the defendants but not the victims. I’d like to put them on Charley. Help, anyone?

India Parker gets three years

India Parker, mother of the missing Kaliyah Parker, has been sentenced to three years for evidence tampering. She admitted that after her daughter died, she put the body out with the trash, didn’t report the death and continued to collect Social Security benefits for Kaliyah for years afterward. (Why they’re not charging her with welfare fraud, like they did with the Bryant and Herrman parents, I don’t know.) India says it was a “lapse of judgement” not to report Kaliyah’s death and she’s sorry.

I believe, and I’m pretty sure the police believe, that she was responsible in some way for the little girl’s death. She had lost custody of her other kids and faced child endangerment charges before. India’s claiming Kaliyah simply died mysteriously in her sleep one night — which sometimes happens but is pretty unlikely. But if she did kill her daughter chances are she’s gotten away with it. They won’t be able to prove it now. Sigh.

A sad email

Yeah, haven’t updated yet. Maybe tomorrow. Got some other stuff going on.

I got a very sad email today from a woman whose mother (no, I’m not saying who) has been missing for a very long time and is on Charley. My correspondent was only three at the time and I guess she grew up believing her mother had abandoned her, when in fact it was in all likelihood foul play at the hands of the missing woman’s husband. But the cops can’t prove it. Anyway, she wrote me asking for more information about the case, saying she knew so little about it and felt lied to and betrayed. And I had to tell her that I don’t know any more about it than she does, in fact probably considerably less. I don’t even have any good photos of this woman.

I hope she is able to find some answers. I referred her to Project Jason, explaining she could get moral support at least from people whose family members were missing and therefore knew exactly how she felt. I wish I could have helped her. Her email brought tears to my eyes.

Whoopsie

Two weeks ago I got an NCMEC notice saying Heather Cannon had been found safe. I had a Heather Cannon on Charley, a runaway teenager from Texas who’s been missing for two and a half years. So I pulled her casefile off of Charley and put up a resolved notice as per standard operating procedure.

Alas, it turns out I made a mistake: the NCMEC was referring to a different Heather Cannon than the girl I had on Charley. The Heather that was found is from Florida. I found out about the mistake when I got an email from LE telling me she was still missing and asking why I had posted the resolved notice.

Since they said they’d been getting a lot of tips from people saying Heather had been found and they knew this because they saw it on Charley, I thought I should write about this on my blog to say Heather has NOT been found and I was in error. Next time I update I will remove the resolved notice and put Heather back up. I need to start checking towns as well as names when I get an NCMEC resolved notice.

I may or may not update today; I’m not sure. The NCMEC site is down right now, it seems — I can’t get it to work and all their notices about new and updated posters are piling up in my inbox because I can’t look at the links. This is very annoying.

New interview

A nice lady writing a book about Websleuths and people trying to identify the unidentified emailed me today. I talked to her for a long time, giving her the history of the MPCCN and stuff. She has a contract signed with a publishing company and her book comes out in 2013.

New MP of the week

External circumstances have gotten me feeling really down and generally angry over the past few days, and I don’t feel like updating at the moment. But it’s Tuesday and I have my MP of the week: Kyanja Keri Vanwey, a seventeen-year-old runaway who disappeared from Des Moines, Iowa in September 2005.

For some reason she wasn’t reported missing for close to four months, and as far as I know there haven’t been any leads on her disappearance. In addition to an AP, there are two photos of Kyanja, and she looks totally different in both. I would not recognize her from one photograph if I looked at the other.

Kyanja, if she is alive, would be 24 today.

UPDATE: To all the peeps out there concerned about my well-being, I’m fine. Really. Just angry about something terrible that happened to a good friend of mine, something which doesn’t directly affect me.

Sadie

My mother gave me the most charming photograph of the family’s Golden Retriever, Sadie, lounging on the deck earlier this spring. I thought I’d share it with you all. (Click for full-size version.)

End of Etan Patz dig

They finished digging up the carpenter’s basement looking for Etan Patz. And, as I had figured, they found nothing. I don’t know whether that means the carpenter, Othniel Miller, was ruled out as a suspect or not. It may not matter much to him if he has been: his name’s been dragged through the mud in the national news and he’ll be drawing suspicious looks for quite awhile.

I wonder if they ever found her

While looking for information on another case I stumbled across this article in Google’s newspaper archive, about the disappearance of Louise Sanders, a young woman who vanished sometime in the late 1930s. She left her home in Alabama to go visit relatives in Illinois, and never came home. It looks like an interesting case, and the article includes a photograph of Louise (albeit a poor quality one) …but this article was written in 1972.

Frankly, it seems unlikely that they would have found her, given that by the time the article was written she’d already been missing for over thirty years. But I’m not going to assume she’s still missing based on a forty-year-old source.